Guy Kawasaki's $12,107.09 rumor site bought, buried

Update: Truemors is back up, though occassionally throwing errors, according our former colleague Jordan Golson over at the Industry Standard.

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A year ago, prolific advice-giver Guy Kawasaki bragged about Truemors, a "a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site" he built entirely on outsourced technology, including $4,500 of software development done in South Dakota. Today, all Truemors URLs redirect to the home page of NowPublic, a little-known citizen journalism site reported to have raised over $10 million. VentureBeat reports that Kawasaki has sold the site to NowPublic. He's almost certainly made a profit, but how much?

If Truemors had really built value, NowPublic would have left the site running. As is, it looks like Truemors' residual traffic is all they want. That's not a million-dollar deal. Kawasaki's real success is as a storyteller — in books, at conferences, and online. He's now got another story to tell. Mission accomplished.